Eden Hill Journal

Comments, dreams, stories, and rantings from a middle-aged native of Maine living on a shoestring and a prayer in the woods of Maine. My portion of the family farm is to be known as Eden Hill Farm just because I want to call it that and because that's the closest thing to the truth that I could come up with. If you enjoy what I write, email me or make a comment. If you enjoy Eden Hill, come visit.

Tuesday, March 27, 2018

Manna from Heaven

So what would you call it if you grew sprouts from hemp seeds, you know the way you can grow alfalfa sprouts or bean sprouts or god knows how many other edible sprouts, but hemp sprouts and then you pressed or rolled them flat maybe and then let this concoction dry till it's crispy dry, and then put it in a sack or bag of some sort for storage and distribution to a population of people?

Hemp if you have forgotten references the cannabis plant.
Cannabis is known throughout the modern English speaking world as marijuana or as "pot".
Pot smokers from days past remember how many of them there used to be and how irritating all those seeds used to be so let's just say there can be a lot of seeds in even a small bud of marijuana. Pot smokers from days past also know that you could pick the seeds out from these fertile buds and plant them and they would sprout.

Recent generations of prohibitionists in their fervor to spread "refer madness" have, driven by the fear of pot's psychoactive effects, dug a very deep hole using the legislative, executive, and judicial powers of federal, state, and local government here in the "land of the free" to dig a very deep hole and attempt to bury all things hemp even including the very thought of it for all time. But history prevailed and slowly Western civilization is once again awakening to the potential uses of hemp including its nutritional value. Don't forget that the fiber of hemp stocks has for eons been woven not just into clothing but also into rope. No doubt they used hemp rope back in the days of all those ancient stone temples.

But I digress, don't I?

So ok let's suppose we can make a dry lightweight durable food staple from sprouted hemp seeds. Would we be the first to ever do such a thing?

Yeah Bill, so what? What's the "Manna from Heaven deal? How does that play in?

Well here's where you need faith. Actually you need a leap of faith. Faith is the belief in that which you know by experience couldn't possibly be true.

It is my belief that the "refer madness" guys have over the ages suppressed the knowledge that the psychoactive properties of hemp are divine. Said another way, those in monotheistic religions who rise above and beyond the norm of everyday humanity - the priests and prophets and kings - would be quite familiar with those very same psychoactive properties, not just in recent decades but in ancient civilizations who thrived eons ago. My generation claims that smoking pot gets people "high". We all know and have known for a long time that God sits "on high". Same high. The burning bush? Divine inspiration? God Himself spoke to Moses from the burning bush. Smoking pot gets you high. It can be divine!

So God lives in pot and in Heaven and smoking hemp is heavenly, divine. So making a special survival staple from hemp could - to avoid the refer madness fanatics who want the God experience all to themselves - be termed as manna from heaven, food from this heavenly plant that grows so profusely in the mountains.

I mean, you know, as usual, just one man's opinion. A leap of faith so to speak.

So I use this word usually in the phrase "big and gommy" which quite well described my second car, a 1952 Buick Roadmaster two-door hardtop with the bigger straight-eight engine and Buick's Dynaflow transmission. This morning I came across the identical car on YouTube, different color, same exact car. I bought mine from my brother Hal. He had it painted bright red with a creamy white roof. It was originally black and belonged to an older related teen in town. It had come from New Jersey so it was rust-free, a rare thing in central Maine even back then in my high school days. My brother had to fish it out of the ditch which was where it was located the day he bought it (May 2 of perhaps 1961 or 1962?) as a result of a late season wet, slippery, six-inch snow. A nice deep ditch too! I seem to recall that he got a good deal on it because of its location. The car was gommy in wet snow.

But yes, gommy, big and gommy. I couldn't lay rubber with that thing even with all that torque. It got something like 8 miles per gallon. Gas was cheap back then but even so... I remember trying to peel out from the Catholic Church parking lot across the street from the high school. The parking lot was dirt so the tires would spin but as soon as they touched pavement... "chirp" was all I ever got from it.

I guess gommy meant uncoordinated, I mean big and gommy doesn't just mean big, it means big and awkward. Stuff doesn't need to be big to be gommy. That wordwizzard post gives some other clues. I guess like gooey stringy icky food stuff qualifies. The way some uncoordinated kid walks and moves might qualify, might not but might.

But that Buick sure did. I replaced it with a 1958 Oldsmobile with a 371 cubic inch "Rocket Olds" V-8. If it hadn't been for the rubber I could burn with that thing that might also have qualified as gommy but mine was a four-door business sedan, stripped, 3-speed manual on the column. My high school buddy's '58 Olds had the same engine but his was a four-door hardtop and had twin four-barrel carbs and a Hydramatic transmission - all factory stock. His burned rubber with both rear tires at the same time. Mine only spun one side at a time. Still if it weren't for the power, those cars would have been gommy.

My brother's first car was a 1948 Pontiac four-door with a flathead straight-eight and a Hydramatic transmission. That car was gommy. I wound up rolling that car over onto its roof when I was twelve or thirteen years old with my best friend Roger sitting right beside me. I don't want to tell you how this happened but we were both inside when the gasoline vapors inside the car caught fire. The car burned to a crisp. So my brother took our dad's old Ford dump truck and an old cable with a hook on it and ripped the body off the frame. The Hydramatic was the last thing burning when the fire finally burned itself out but he put old drain oil in the transmission and got the engine running and we drove the frame around for one summer. Country life, you know. We never drove it on the road but I do recall one day throwing some old cushions on it and loading it up with a few friends and driving it across the airport.
I don't know if that 48 Pontiac frame would qualify as gommy... Not to me but maybe to someone else.

I wound up selling my Roadmaster sometime around 1964 to one of the Greenville Bigney's, the one that was WABI's weatherman. He bought it from me for $35.00. The front shocks were worn out and they weren't cheap! The rest of the car was pristine - well maybe the tires had some wear.

Saturday, March 24, 2018

Iran

Recently I've watched several travel videos on YouTube that were filmed in Ireland and were done by an American named Rick Steves. His commentary seems well researched but his personality is way too Americanish for me. By that I mean naïve, overly simplistic and American-centric if that makes any sense. Americanish doesn't even pass the spell check acid test.

But this evening I couldn't seem to get to sleep and I wound up back on YouTube and was presented by YouTube with a link to a video that he and his film crew did in Iran. This is unlike anything I have ever watched before. I found it amazing, a visual spectacle, culturally revealing, and just plain awesome to see - an adventure. It's enough to make me ashamed to be such a believe whatever I am told monocultural Americanish spell-check-triggering ignoramus.

Friday, March 23, 2018

A Walking Talking Contradiction

Just one man's opinion, mind you, but this John Bolton guy that President Trump seems to want as the head of America's national security is a walking talking contradiction. Back in 2003 when President Bush the Second led us into war in Iraq based on nothing but lies and propaganda my support for Bush vanished. Poof! Gone! Now Trump somehow thinks hiring the same fool Bush relied on is good for America?
Good luck, Donald, but count me out. Neocons just plain suck. Can't be and shouldn't be trusted.
Just one man's opinion, though. Don't take my word for it. Think for yourself.

Tuesday, March 13, 2018

Dreams

Wednesday, March 07, 2018

Styx - American Religion Debate

This conversation is just what I've been waiting for for the past five or more decades.

Styx, my Vermont long-haired hero, takes on an unbelievably nasty in-your-face master of fallacy debater who doesn't seem to care what anybody else sees or believes, he knows beyond any doubt that Christianity is the truth. Everything otherwise is somehow immoral and heretical and heathen and just plain evil if the listener paraphrases his hype.